Finishing touches

This week

1. Planning plots for publication
2. Font/point/line size
3. Complex plot operations
4. Reproducible visualization

Planning for public consumption

Manuscripts:

• Don’t let the journal resize your figures
• Determine the column and page dimensions of your intended journal
• You might have to reformat figures for a different journal

Presentations:

• Don’t present talks or posters with microtext.

Manuscripts

Print a page at 100% (no “fit-to-page”). Measure with a ruler.

Plan for figure dimensions

• Single column: long figures / panels
• Two column: wide figures / panels

How does your eye move around the figure?

• Left to right
• Top to bottom

Scaling

Everything in a figure needs to be readable

• Text
• Labels
• Lines
• Colors and gradients

Figure output

Use vector output (pdf, svg, eps, wmf [Windows]) for as long as possible.

• ggsave()
  • width, height
• cowplot::save_plot()
  • base_width, base_height
  • Works well with plot_grid()
  • Adjust figure aspect ratio